I

The relationship between Banks and Cook shifted during their lives from a more equitable bond to a state of hierarchical dependence by one upon the other, encouraging acts like those involving Rudd and developing alongside Banks’s emergence as the greatest scientific patron of the age. However, before Banks could help Cook’s family, he had to meet the man himself. This took place after the beginning of planning for a voyage to the Pacific (1768–71), officially organized by the Royal Society and Admiralty to observe the 1769 Transit of Venus. On 5 May 1768, the society’s council was informed that Cook had been appointed to the command of the voyage’s ship, HMB Endeavour.Footnote ¹⁰ In February 1768 it had also become known that Banks was to join the expedition as a supernumerary and self-funded naturalist.Footnote ¹¹ The society petitioned the Admiralty in June to include him and his suite on the ship, and this was sanctioned soon after. In the time between Cook’s commission and their sailing from Plymouth in August, the two would have conferred on various matters relating to the voyage.

The expedition lasted three years, during which time Banks and Cook formed a friendship characterized by collaboration and understanding in the face of dispute. As J. C. Beaglehole notes, it is ‘very clear that warm personal friendship sprang up’ between Cook, his first lieutenant John Gore, the master’s mate Charles Clerke, and the scientific party led by Banks.Footnote ¹² Between Cook and Banks especially, a lasting bond can be seen to have formed. The effects of a lengthy, perilous, and momentous voyage were exacerbated by the cramped conditions of the Endeavour. These combined to test the resilience of fast-made friendships and, while disagreements between Banks and Cook were infrequent, they did occur. For the most part, they stemmed from disputes over the priorities of the voyage. In March 1770, as the Endeavour tacked along the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, Banks’s hopes of landing to survey envisaged mineral and botanical riches were rebuffed by Cook, who considered the winds unfavourable and possibilities of safely harbouring absent.Footnote ¹³ Banks harboured a grudge in response, and as late as 1803 he recalled the lost opportunities of that day and others with all the fruits and comfort of hindsight.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet this instance of working at cross purposes is nothing compared to the trying conduct of the naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster which Cook was made to endure on his next voyage. Indeed, Cook was an accommodating advocate for the ‘gentlemen’ of the Endeavour’s scientific pursuits, to which he was himself inclined. He had, after all, sacrificed his exclusive use of the great cabin to their business and, in contrast to the often supercilious behaviour of Royal Navy officers at sea, proved personable, dining each night with his passengers and engaging with their work.Footnote ¹⁵ A study of Cook’s journal, for instance, shows the influence of Banks on its content, with many passages copied from the latter’s, a collaborative practice that was accepted and even encouraged among the scientific party.Footnote ¹⁶

Even after the voyage, when Banks assumed a cocksure attitude implying that his new-found fame had gone to his head, he remained on good terms with Cook.Footnote ¹⁷ It was during this period, between the Endeavour’s return and Cook’s second voyage, that Banks began to exert his aristocratic licence more blatantly than before, leveraging inequalities in the relationship and displaying behaviour illustrative of one who regards themself to be socially superior. One month after their return, Cook learned of his promotion to the rank of commander by way of Banks, owing to the latter’s connections with high-ranking naval officials and his close relationship with John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty. Occurrences of this sort registered a shift towards a relationship in which ‘affective’ friendship and patronage jostled for primacy, indicating that a return to Britain may have encouraged hierarchies suppressed at sea to reassert themselves on land.

Naval officers were often gentlemen, yet Cook was assuredly not genteel, having risen from humble origins. By contrast, Banks is estimated to have been one of England’s richest landowners, following a privileged education at Eton, Harrow, and Christ Church, Oxford.Footnote ¹⁸ Historians have therefore suggested that Cook’s acquiescence to Banks’s increasingly egotistical conduct stemmed from origins in a class ‘accustomed to taking orders’, his deference to superiors a habit learned in youth as well as the navy.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet Cook’s and Banks’s friendship formed in the floating world of the Endeavour, far from Britain’s shores. Even if, as Vanessa Smith has shown, norms of obligation could still exert a familiar power in distant waters, there was a qualitative difference between home and away, encouraging an adjustment to accustomed codes of conduct beyond Britain.Footnote ²⁰ Although the two men’s friendship was not cross-cultural, it did traverse a rigid social hierarchy. This was partially enabled by the conditioning effects of distance. The co-existence of a natural historical party funded by and under the sole command of Banks with the surrounding naval hierarchies of Cook’s domain also contributed to a relative levelling of social differences, as Edwin Rose has convincingly argued.Footnote ²¹ Insulated from the immediate strictures of a domestic social order, the two operated closer to the rank of equals than may have been countenanced beyond the liminal space of the ship-at-sea.Footnote ²²

Moreover, when the Endeavour set sail, Banks was just twenty-five, and youth may have played a part in allowing friendships transcending hierarchies to develop. As he wrote in 1784 of the naturalist Daniel Solander, who had accompanied Banks and Cook on their voyage and who had died two years earlier,

Banks’s relations with Cook likely benefited from similar conditions, helping to surmount deeply ingrained social divisions. Indeed, a growing number of historians have shown how friendships could form notwithstanding these.Footnote ²⁴ In the case of Cook and Banks, distance from home, the latter’s youth, and a shared scientific mentality may help to explain the results.

After their return to Britain in 1771, the public response overwhelmingly feted Banks and Solander as champions of the voyage. Celebrity fed Banks’s conceit, and by extension his self-worth as measured against Cook. While the buzz of these attitudes soon died down and was eventually corrected, they found a persistent devotee in the person of the king. On 2 August 1771, Banks was presented to George III at the court of St James’s. Cook did not meet the king until 14 August. For Banks, these opportunities initiated another long-standing friendship that would exert a powerful influence across his life. By contrast, Cook never embraced public acclaim. To an extent his station precluded him from enjoying it, and it was largely through interventions by patrons like Banks or Sandwich that he experienced recognition at all. ‘Promotion unsolicited to a man in my situation in life’, he wrote to Banks,

On land, the chain of command prevailing at sea was reconfigured, and Cook’s authority meant less than it had before.Footnote ²⁶ Since returning, in contrast to Banks, his life revolved around a domestic existence at Mile End with his wife and sons. From there he maintained an active working schedule, dispensing with the business of the Endeavour and planning for an already envisaged successor voyage.

The circumstances leading to Banks’s withdrawal from Cook’s next voyage (1772–5) have been told many times and do not bear repeating.Footnote ²⁷ Suffice to say, for reasons of seaworthiness, additions to the structure of Cook’s ship, HMS Resolution, which Banks considered essential but the Navy Board correctly regarded as an encumbrance, lay at the heart of his refusal to join Cook. At great personal cost, Banks and his entourage chose not to sail in July 1772. Instead, Banks redirected his resources towards a voyage to the Hebrides and Iceland. One of the most remarkable aspects of this reversal is the way in which Banks and Cook kept their relationship intact; in the face of outbursts by Banks, Cook’s reconciliatory response is striking.Footnote ²⁸ He wrote from Sheerness on the eve of departure and the Cape of Good Hope three months later, with every indication of their disagreement having been recognized as an unfortunate episode in an otherwise unblemished attachment. As his second letter avowed:

What Cook felt he owed Banks can only be guessed at. Yet, whether he was referencing duty, devotion, or some combination of these, the tone of his letter is irrefutably conciliatory.

Banks settled into the role of celebrated circumnavigator with ease, seeing new hierarchies develop in the relationship with his erstwhile captain. Given his behaviour at this time, it has even been reckoned that they would not have survived another voyage on good terms.Footnote ³⁰ Cook spent three years at sea, seeking to disprove the theorized existence of an unknown southern continent in the Pacific. Following the Resolution’s return, his friendship with Banks resumed. This owed something to his accomplishments, and the respect they induced. Cook had acted as a model natural philosopher, testing the accuracy of Kendall’s marine chronometer; employing new diets, cleaning regimens, and anti-scorbutics; and ranging farther south than any expedition to date. Upon Cook’s arrival, Banks was away from London, and his failure to return immediately has been appraised as a slight or sign of embarrassment after the Resolution debacle.Footnote ³¹ This, however, is a case of seeking conflict where little is to be found. Cook, Solander wrote to Banks, ‘desires his best Compl^ts to You, he expressed himsel^f in the most friendly manner towards you, that could be, he said: nothing could have added to the satisfaction he has had, in making this tour, but having had your company’.Footnote ³² Some of this is surely politesse, but the continuance of Cook’s and Banks’s bond is evidenced here as elsewhere. Recrimination, on the captain’s part at least, appeared absent.

The shifting nature of the two men’s relationship poses problems for its easy definition, evoking the impasse arrived at by Tadmor and others. Yet, the nature of their bond was evidently robust, and continued to trend in a positive direction. Cook became a Fellow of the Royal Society soon after his return, with Banks as one of his sponsors. That same year, Banks commissioned a portrait of Cook from Nathaniel Dance, and for Charles Clerke soon after. In 1776, Cook received the society’s Copley Medal, awarded for acts of great scientific merit, in recognition of his efforts to combat scurvy. Through gestures like these, a connection formed that saw Banks, though a younger man, position himself as Cook’s patron.

When Cook departed on his last Pacific voyage (1776–80), returning to service after experimenting with retirement to search for a north-west passage, the tie that formed between him and Banks was as strong as it ever would be. Cook’s voyage ended when he was killed in confused circumstances at Hawai‘i. Clerke assumed command and, though terminally ill, communicated what had occurred in a series of letters dispatched to London. In one, dictated from his deathbed and addressed to Banks, he gave attention to their own lasting bond:

At the end of his life, Clerke honoured his links with Banks; by the time his letter reached Britain, he too had perished. The news broke six months later, when Sandwich wrote to inform Banks of Cook’s death: ‘Dear Sir/what is uppermost in our mind allways must come out first, poor captain Cooke is no more’.Footnote ³⁴

In The good natur’d man (1768), Oliver Goldsmith described friendship as ‘a disinterested commerce between equals’, showing a striking affinity with modern definitions, for which questions of inequality within friendship’s bounds threaten to corrupt the ideal.Footnote ³⁵ This complicates the picture of Cook’s and Banks’s bond. Indeed, the question of how one could be both a patron and a friend arises in part from a disconnect between early modern and modern understandings of friendship. The onset of the two men’s relationship occurred at a moment when this shift was being made.Footnote ³⁶ To a modern sensibility, considerable inequalities in station would appear to preclude an affective connection between them. Yet, this is not borne out in studies of friendship in this period, which are attentive to the tense, sometimes paradoxical, co-existence of inequality and affect.Footnote ³⁷ Although Banks expressed a desire to avoid an ‘aristocratic disposition’ in his friendships, he could still find occasions to speak in antithetical terms, as he did of James Lind, his friend of many years, in a letter to Lord Macartney, presenting the surgeon as ‘a man accustomed to Obedience & well acquainted with the Station of an inferior’.Footnote ³⁸ Accepting that a person may change their mind or err in their judgements, or that Banks may have been playing to Macartney’s prejudices, this kind of mismatch raises the question of whether Cook and Banks were or could be friends, given the finely graded ladder of social distinction they were perched upon. Was the difference in their ranks an insuperable barrier to the bond they formed being regarded as a truly affective one; how did this intersect with Banks’s subsequent role as Cook’s patron; and what does this tell us about how such friendships were performed or perceived in the period?

The key problem these questions pose is whether ‘affective’ friendship was possible between those who were socially unequal. As John Gascoigne remarks, Banks had a ‘strong sense of social rank’.Footnote ³⁹ Rose has likewise shown how the customs and ‘aristocratic privilege’ of Banks and other ‘genteel naturalists’ structured the practice of natural history in the period, including during the Endeavour voyage, limiting the possibilities of equitable exchange. Collaboration was curbed, Rose argues, by hierarchical conceptions of the social order shaping codes within which scientific work and social ties were conceived of and practised.Footnote ⁴⁰ Inequalities in rank found a procedural expression in social institutions such as patronage, which Banks would wield to great effect in the construction of his influence across the coming decades. Rudd’s reference to Banks as both ‘friend’ and ‘patron’ is therefore revealing in its recognition of an inequality in rank even as it reaffirmed a bond connoting intimacy and personal obligation. In order to apprehend the strength of this bond, however, one must look to the period after Cook’s death, and to those inheriting the ties he formed in life.

II

Cook was more famous in death than in life, yet it would be some time before he achieved the status of martyr to British exploration and empire he subsequently attained.Footnote ⁴¹ Many of Banks’s gifts to Cook were also posthumous. After 1779, Banks became the ‘general manager of the reputation of Cook’.Footnote ⁴² From 1771, he had made himself indispensable where publication of voyage accounts was concerned, negotiating authorial and financial rights and using his standing with crews, the Admiralty, artists, and publishers to facilitate the production of accurate public-facing narratives. As a result of his sailing with Cook, Banks emerged as the ‘eminence grise behind scientific voyaging and the custodian of the Cook model’.Footnote ⁴³ His influence was felt across all the major exploratory voyages of the next half-century, including those of William Bligh, George Vancouver, and Matthew Flinders. All these men, and many more besides, had sailed with Cook.Footnote ⁴⁴ And yet, it was personal acts by Banks that most convincingly substantiated the resilience of his bond with the captain.

The Flecks affair was among the most extreme examples, but Banks had helped Cook’s family before.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the captain’s absence, the Admiralty had also provided an allowance to his family. During his second voyage, this precipitated a payment to Elizabeth Cook of £300 per annum. Profits accruing from the sale of Cook’s written account of the voyage were also to go to their author. After his murder, half of these were reappointed to his wife, for whom an Admiralty pension of £200 per annum, and £25 per annum for each of their sons, was secured through interventions by Sandwich and the king.Footnote ⁴⁶ Financially, as well as socially, Elizabeth Cook’s circumstances were defined by her marriage, a common condition for naval wives.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although she lived as a widow for fifty-six years, she would not do so impecuniously, as the effects of her husband’s own social mobility were felt above all by his family. Banks played a part in ensuring this and, as he had for Solander’s mother and sister after the Swede’s death in 1782, he went on to help the Cook family for many years.Footnote ⁴⁸

How might we better apprehend the continuance and longevity of this relationship? In line with recent developments in the histories of emotions and material culture, objects present one approach.Footnote ⁴⁹ Particularly useful are those relating to the period following Cook’s death. These help to differentiate between ‘official’ friendship, encompassing relationships centring partly or even entirely on patronage, and ‘affective’ friendships, which, though frequently overlapping with the first, were nevertheless discrete, and lacked the transactional qualities of a patronage relationship.Footnote ⁵⁰ Objects such as brooches, mourning rings, and locks or strands of a deceased person’s hair were often involved in processes of remembrance, and fell short of anything transactional. Gifts given posthumously, as Alan Bray’s analysis of funerary monuments shows, lack an obvious instrumentality where reciprocity with the dead is concerned.Footnote ⁵¹ As gestures of friendship, they materialize interpersonal ties. Such objects give rise to the question: what happens to a friendship in its afterlife? The very notion that it can ‘endure beyond the grave’, as Bray writes, shows its power to bind individuals together.Footnote ⁵²

Ella Sbaraini has argued that objects may exert agency on behalf of a deceased person and thus deny their social death, notwithstanding a corporeal one.Footnote ⁵³ The afterlife of a person’s relationships may therefore be found in objects remaining with some link to the dead or their memory. One example is the commemorative medal struck in honour of Cook by the Royal Society on the initiative of Banks in 1784. The ‘Cook medal’ worked to connect its namesake with Banks across the rupture of death, as well as to strengthen the relationship between the latter and the captain’s widow. It therefore helped to constitute the network underpinning the Flecks affair. While multiple versions were struck, one specific medal found its way into Elizabeth Cook’s possession. In doing so, it linked itself to the memory of the captain in several distinct ways: as a collective memorial for the nation and the Royal Society; as a symbol of Banks’s friendship and a dedication to the memory of that friendship; and as a personal memento for his wife.

The idea for a commemorative medal arose immediately following news of Cook’s demise. Ten days later, while chairing his first meeting of the Royal Society council as president, Banks suggested an act of remembrance be undertaken on the society’s behalf. On 27 January 1780, this took shape in the proposal for striking a medal. It was decided that a subscription would be opened among the fellowship to fund the medal’s production in gold, silver, and bronze versions. These were priced in descending orders of value – from twenty guineas for the gold to one guinea for either one silver or two bronze.Footnote ⁵⁴ Several designs were immediately presented to the society. Of the eventual seventeen, that by Lewis Pingo, chief engraver to the Royal Mint, was deemed the most appropriate and selected in June.Footnote ⁵⁵ This displayed a profile of Cook on the obverse side, with the motto ‘The most intrepid investigator of the seas’ inscribed on it in Latin. The reverse showed Fortune leaning against a column, pressing a rudder on a globe, and bore the inscription ‘Our men have left nothing unattempted’. In 1784, 13 gold, 289 silver, and 500 bronze medals were struck. Four of the gold medals were presented to heads of state; using surplus funds, several more were produced and gifted to persons of note: Sandwich, William Cooke, Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Planta, and Cook’s widow.Footnote ⁵⁶

Quite apart from its national or institutional resonances, the production of the medal held a strong personal meaning for Banks, who managed the process throughout and doubtless considered it a private gesture of remembrance for his friend.Footnote ⁵⁷ Ruth Scobie has noted how the immediate public reaction to news of Cook’s death was muted, and that the medal was by most assessments a fairly conventional tribute.Footnote ⁵⁸ As a gesture from the Royal Society, however, it was unusual, both in its focus on an individual and because it succeeded, whereas many similar subscription schemes failed to meet their goals. Banks’s actions should be considered in light of this, with the lengths to which he was willing and able to go recognized above all else for their personal dimensions. This does not preclude the possibility of his determination to more effectively bind his name to that of the famous navigator in the public eye, though, and to bolster his own influence and legacy in the process. Indeed, among the chief products of a patronage relationship for patrons was an increase of repute by association.Footnote ⁵⁹ Elizabeth Cook thanked Banks for her medal upon receipt, maintaining that the honour Banks and the society had ‘been pleased to confer on my late husband, and through him on me, and his Children’ stood as a mark of the bond between the two men.Footnote ⁶⁰ She kept the object until her death, whereupon it and the Copley Medal were donated to the British Museum as stipulated in her will.Footnote ⁶¹ The Cook medal’s treatment in this document conveys something of its sentimental charge, and it looms large in the context of a sparse archive from Elizabeth, who disposed of many of her possessions before her death.Footnote ⁶²

Objects like the Cook medal ‘bear witness to the affective relationships of people to the material world, and to other people and ideas’.Footnote ⁶³ They encompass a multiplicity of meanings, including love, grief, remembrance, or elegy, and as such offer material traces of memorialization. The absence of the dead is invoked, and to some extent arrested, by the presence of the thing. The medal was an attempt to frame the loss of its namesake. It was also an intermediary in the relationship connecting Banks and the Cooks, and a public declaration of Banks’s bond with the famed captain and his exploits. Such multi-valency of meaning shows it to have been an active participant in the network involving these three. It also represented the dedication of Banks to memorialize his friend and ensure that the fruits of his labours were passed on to his wife. For Elizabeth Cook in particular, it functioned as what psychologists examining grief have termed a ‘linking object’, sustaining a relationship between the living and the dead through unique associations or properties.Footnote ⁶⁴ Finally, the medal worked to maintain the strong tie between Banks and the captain in the public eye, helping to explain those acts of charity and patronage precipitated by a series of letters issuing from Yorkshire decades later, signifying a friendship remembered and a strong tie sustained.

III

When Bartholomew Rudd inveigled himself in the matter of the Flecks and dispatched his first letters to Banks, he was relying on his knowledge of the connection between the latter and Cook. With Cook long dead, Rudd appealed to the memory and continuance of this bond. In responding to his pleas, Banks acted as a broker for subsequent acts of charity towards Cook’s family. He was also discharging his duties to a dead man. If we are to understand the nature of the patronage relationship that emerged in this instance, then we need to grapple with the formation, sundering, and reconfiguration of interpersonal ties.

Banks was quick to respond to Rudd’s message, and by 23 August 1801 had received a reply. Though he was willing to ‘plead the cause of Capt. Cook’s sister’, Banks suggested Margaret Fleck first write to Elizabeth Cook via Rudd, a point of procedure indicating the primacy of family support in such situations.Footnote ⁶⁵ ‘She has of course followed the advice you have so kindly given’, Rudd replied,

Rudd and Banks therefore functioned as intermediaries linking Cook’s sister and widow. They had assumed the roles of brokers, and through their involvement a new patronage relationship connecting Elizabeth Cook with the Flecks began. It seems that, in the years since James’s death, these two sides of the family had become estranged. Although she indicated some knowledge of the Flecks’ situation in 1792, Elizabeth Cook may have only met her husband’s family once, in December 1771, and the need to verify Margaret’s pleas through endorsement by parish officials does suggest a barrier of some kind was still in place three decades later.Footnote ⁶⁷

In re-establishing contact between Elizabeth Cook and the Flecks, Rudd operated as what Granovetter terms a ‘bridge’, serving to connect two otherwise unconnected networks by way of a new interpersonal tie. Bridges are also invariably ‘weak ties’. That is, were a strong tie to be in place, then the two ‘separate’ networks would by fact and definition already be linked.Footnote ⁶⁸ Rudd was not known to Banks (nor, one may reasonably assume, Elizabeth Cook), and his initial letter can therefore be seen as the first step in forming a new interpersonal bridge. A request for goodwill thereafter became the basis for a lasting familial (and financial) bond. Even so, at this stage Rudd remained cautious: ‘If, contrary to expectations, no answer should be returned or an unfavourable one I will then transmit to you a regular certificate more fully detailing Mrs. Fleck’s age & circumstances together with those of her husband.’ One way or another, Rudd sought to forge a path linking the Flecks with a source of charity. If Elizabeth Cook were to ‘disappoint our hopes’, then Rudd was sure of Banks’s personal influence coming through. With plaintive temerity, he expressed his confidence in the latter’s interception with government in their favour proving successful.Footnote ⁶⁹

Although Rudd’s intention to prompt Banks’s help for the Flecks was dependent on Banks’s dedication to the memory of Cook, it was conditioned by a hierarchical relationship between the parties. Rudd’s next letter communicated that £10 had been donated by Banks to Margaret Fleck, showing how conventional forms of charity were also dispensed with as part of the affair. This came at an opportune moment, ‘for in consequence of a very unfavourable season for the catching of Lobsters & crabs which is now the occupation of her husband they have been reduced to great distress indeed’. To their litany of travails the Flecks could now add a degree of condescension on the part of Rudd, who recommended that the best means of administering Banks’s charity would be to manage it himself, advancing it by a weekly allowance to the family as required.Footnote ⁷⁰ Rudd’s pivotal position in the transaction of influence as well as financial aid strengthens the case for his being considered a bridge.

Some awareness of the call to noblesse oblige – the notion of generosity as a social responsibility for those benefiting most from the status quo – is also perceptible. Since the early modern period in England at least, this moral obligation had come to be regarded as an important manifestation of gentility, with liberality, generosity, and munificence considered vital to the gentry’s right to rule.Footnote ⁷¹ Like Banks, though on a more modest scale, Rudd was a propertied gentleman, being a joint owner of the Middlesbrough estate. His home at Marton Lodge was, moreover, built on the site of Cook’s birth. This almost certainly motivated his abiding involvement with the Flecks. Conscious of his hierarchical links to these fisherfolk, Rudd extended this awareness to Banks in an inverse direction. His actions animate the ladder of Georgian social stratification, with a duty to express largesse towards social ‘inferiors’ and a corresponding deference to one’s ‘betters’ serving as a spur to Rudd’s and Banks’s charity and a prop to the case for the latter’s duty to Cook by way of the Flecks.Footnote ⁷²

Banks had acted upon his decision to help the Flecks, unlike Elizabeth Cook, who had not yet responded. With this in mind, Rudd closed his next letter by leaning into the hope for some kind of pension, delivering his faith in this with his customary nod to the memory of ‘Capt. Cook’.Footnote ⁷³ In October, the Flecks’ son James visited Banks with an introductory letter from Rudd. This was another attempt to elicit charity, now in the form of preferment for Cook’s nephew, of whom Rudd wrote:

Rudd attempted to forge an association between James Cook and those deemed worthy of patronage in his solicitations to Banks, appealing to the memory of Cook’s and Banks’s connection even as he exemplified the wider trend towards justifying patronage on the basis of merit instead of kinship ties.Footnote ⁷⁵ A note made on the letter in Banks’s hand states that the vessel of which James Fleck was master had been purchased in part with a loan of £225 from Elizabeth Cook, who had clearly replied to Rudd by this point and so had responded to the Flecks’ distress. Also noted is her instruction for James to pay the annual interest of the loan to his mother as a means of supplementing her income.Footnote ⁷⁶ Such prudence was characteristic of Elizabeth, especially in her dealings with the Flecks.Footnote ⁷⁷

In January 1802, Banks wrote to inform Rudd of his failure to secure an annuity of some kind from the Admiralty. The state had already provided for the captain’s family in the aftermath of his death, he detailed, and ‘if the bounty of the public was in this case to be extended to other relations it would form a precedent for applications the extent of which no one could foresee’. Banks considered this a ‘flat refusal & I believe I have now nothing to expect from the quarter where … you & myself expected the most’.Footnote ⁷⁸ No doubt exasperated with the matter, he sought to bring his engagement with it to an end. He had many demands on his attention, influence, and purse, and his continuing involvement in the Flecks affair beyond its necessary life course and usefulness was something he most likely wished to delimit. This was notwithstanding his obligations towards the captain and his established role as a broker in similar interactions, a function of his status as a gentleman.Footnote ⁷⁹ With the relationship between Elizabeth Cook and the Flecks re-established, and administering of charity on the basis of a shared connection with James Cook carried out, Rudd’s bridging function was complete and defunct. A second path of ties, independent of that involving himself and Banks, had been created and he was no longer to be the pivotal point of contact between the two networks.

But there was more to come. The £10 donated by Banks to the Flecks had been apportioned by Rudd and local parish officials for the purchasing of ‘various articles of food & cloathing [sic]’. The letter bearing this news was witnessed and signed on the reverse by Joseph Wilkinson, one such official, from Redcar.Footnote ⁸⁰ It also bore news of a less wholesome kind. It would seem that Margaret Fleck was not the deserving subject of charity she was initially supposed to have been, a reflection of Rudd’s gendered expectations of her as much as his patronizing condescension. In his dealings with Cook’s relatives, Rudd had formed the opinion that ‘the character & conduct of Mrs. Fleck’ was ‘not so regular or proper’. She was, it transpired, a drunk, and Rudd had ‘much reason to apprehend that what [was] given in a becoming way [was] converted to improper purposes’. Mortified, he suggested ‘exertions on her behalf ought here to terminate’.Footnote ⁸¹

Whether the Flecks consciously deceived Rudd or used him to improve their lot is unknown.Footnote ⁸² Yet, this was not without precedent. In 1776, Cook – three and a half months before departing on his final voyage – was embroiled in the fortunes of James Fleck senior, who had been accused of smuggling. This incident also involved a literate intermediary, as well as an appeal for assistance via Cook. ‘[M]y Brother in Law, James Flick [sic],’ Cook wrote to the Guisborough attorney John Harrison,

Lacking knowledge of the relevant law or contacts among the commissioners of the boards of customs or excise, Cook was content to leave his brother-in-law to face the authorities. While we do not know if the matter was subsequently resolved through patronage, this behaviour should be considered in light of what followed. A pattern can be seen in the relationship between the Flecks and Cook which reveals both the activation of familial duty to aid those down on their luck and the obligations of the more fortunate towards the less.Footnote ⁸⁴

The Flecks’ dependence on the support of those better off than them was not extraordinary. Family and kin were important resources for those in dire straits in this period. For the severely impoverished or elderly, like Margaret and James Fleck, this was a marked reality.Footnote ⁸⁵ Banks, through his links to Cook, was plugged in to this system. As such, what Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers have styled the ‘country-house ideal of paternalism’ entered the matter, and may even have been more prevalent in the rural surroundings from which the Flecks’ pleas, or pleas on their behalf, originated.Footnote ⁸⁶ Self-legitimizing norms of paternalistic conduct underpinning hierarchical aspects of the social order expressed themselves in such cases, even if, in the ‘age of reform’, their currency was waning.Footnote ⁸⁷

Fresh news of the Flecks reached Banks in 1805, by which time the family had established contact with him independent of Rudd. The younger James had written in March to seek help in acquiring a position as a revenue officer responsible for the prevention of smuggling. This would maintain the maritime theme in the family’s employment, although its irony in light of his father’s past would not have been lost on an informed observer. Like his parents, James had come into financial hardship and had been forced to sell the vessel purchased with the help of Elizabeth Cook’s loan three years earlier. After appealing to Banks for help, he had been directed towards Rudd to have the nature of the office he sought explained.Footnote ⁸⁸ The interpersonal network that had developed on the basis of a shared relationship with James Cook had evolved to take on a new life of its own.

At this time, neither Cook nor his sister, the anchors of the relationship which brought this network about, were still alive. Margaret Fleck had died in the autumn of the previous year. As Rudd told Banks: ‘Her unfortunate proclivity to strong liquor to which she was violently addicted rendered all endeavors [sic] to make her comfortable quite ineffectual.’Footnote ⁸⁹ With the deaths of James Cook and his sister, the links between Elizabeth Cook, Banks, and the objects of their patronage were reconfigured. It was now the Fleck children who benefited, or sought to benefit, from the ties their uncle had formed in life. Banks’s involvement was all but done, and with the exception of his being approached by Thomas Fleck in 1816 to help him secure a position as a coal meter or customs official, he had by 1805 relinquished his responsibilities for the Flecks to Elizabeth.Footnote ⁹⁰ Her links to her husband’s side of the family would sustain the relationship begun by Rudd and brokered by Banks, her actions in the present being founded on ties in the past.

For Elizabeth Cook, marriage brought about not only an ‘alliance of two kinship groups, but also their incorporation’. She was accordingly added to her husband’s family network and vice versa, expanding each other’s ‘reservoir of recognised kin’ as well as duties extending beyond kin, including those towards friends.Footnote ⁹¹ Tadmor and Bray have both stressed the entanglement of friendship and kinship in early modern social networks. Obligations of friendship, when solemnly given, assumed an ‘objective character that made them indistinguishable from those of kinship’. Friendships could in this way be considered acts of ‘voluntary kinship’ akin to marriage pacts, seeing these distinct, though enmeshed ties join as parts of a whole. When they were brought together, Bray explains, the ‘effect [was] to embed the family, in the more narrow sense of a group of parents and their children, within a wider and overlapping network of friendship’, and vice versa.Footnote ⁹² Banks acted accordingly. By comparison, Elizabeth Cook’s duty to her husband explains the readiness with which she offered help, even if he had been dead for two decades.

The effects can be understood to some extent from the contents of her will, in which the Flecks were beneficiaries. In wills from this period, property was usually left to near kin, reflecting a trend away from the importance of expansive kinship structures towards the normalization of nucleated families.Footnote ⁹³ Although the family system of patronage declined from this period onwards, extended family remained an important source for financial aid.Footnote ⁹⁴ Single or childless persons, especially women, were more likely to leave bequests to distant relations.Footnote ⁹⁵ None of the Cooks’ six children outlived their mother, so the inclusion of the Flecks in Elizabeth Cook’s will was in keeping with custom. Although she was in most respects an exceptional case, being a relatively wealthy widow of humble social origins, her bequests to the Flecks were also indicative of the growing prominence of female testators. Such was the case notwithstanding the somewhat paradoxical erosion of women’s property rights across the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁶ All of Margaret and James Fleck’s surviving children and grandchildren received money from Elizabeth Cook, in addition to furniture, linen, and other possessions, with the total value of bequests to her husband’s side of the family totalling £6,900, of which £3,700 was held in trust. This was a substantial sum for ostensibly poor, provincial folk.Footnote ⁹⁷ Yet the practices through which it was distributed and the web of ties enabling its transmission are notable for their dependence on a network of obligations traversing rank, urban–rural divisions, and the passage of time.

Here was a patronage relationship that was as unorthodox in its involvement of a female creditor separated from the objects of her beneficence by distance, time, and station as it was typical in a reliance upon highly structured notions of rank, mutual interest, and the occasional application of flattery.Footnote ⁹⁸ The participation of mediators in the form of Rudd and Banks was just as crucial. It should be remembered that Rudd’s initial message to Banks was not issued with the express purpose of establishing contact with Elizabeth Cook. Rather, the desire on his part was to source charity for the Flecks. The resulting patronage relationship, backed in the end by James Cook’s widow instead of his friend, was coincidental. Even so, it depended on the involvement of a cast of intermediaries that included Banks. Rudd provided a bridge enabling this to take place. Banks brokered the relationship that resulted, putting the Flecks in contact with Elizabeth Cook and lending support to their cause. In each case, action was motivated by the memory of a connection with James Cook. Though dead, he was from this point of view the central member of the network responsible for alleviating his relatives’ distress. The crucial figure of an ‘ego-centric’ network, Cook’s relationship with each actor in the Flecks affair survived to exert a posthumous effect. Ties with him informed both the original reactions of Banks and Elizabeth Cook and the form which the network went on to take as decisions were made about where to direct influence or action. At each stage, it was not just ‘strong’ or even ‘weak’ ties which drove individuals’ behaviour, but past ties, too.

IV

Joseph Banks was a man commanding powerful loyalties, and he could also display this quality. In 1784, the year the Cook medal was struck, the clergyman and biographer of James Cook, Andrew Kippis, described the president as ‘very preserving in his friendships. Those who have formed the closest intimacy with him have continued their connection, and maintained their esteem and regard. This was the case with Capt. Cook and Dr. Solander; and other instances might, I believe, be mentioned to the same purpose.’Footnote ⁹⁹ Hector Cameron, among the most sensitive of Banks’s biographers to this quality, contended that, of all his attributes, Banks was above all ‘a man of close and enduring friendships’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This applied to patronage bonds, too, which proved similarly dynamic. Births, marriages, and life-altering events (as well as life-ending ones) could all affect the structure of a network in which friendship and patronage featured. This article has considered one instance of this, seeking to better understand how networks constituted by kin and friendship ties formed, fell apart, and reassembled in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, and to analyse their uses for clients and patrons alike.

And yet, the fundamental problem, as Cameron notes, is that Banks’s ‘patronage is often not easy to distinguish from kindliness’ or good-natured aid such as that provided to a friend.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Friendship was a moral as well as a reciprocal relationship.Footnote ¹⁰² By comparison, patronage was an overtly instrumental social institution which, though serving both patron and client, did not appeal to the same moral compulsions. Banks’s support for the Flecks must be regarded as an act undertaken in pursuit of reaffirming his bond with Cook, as a function of the tie existing between them in life and its memory. Even accounting for the performative aspects of their friendship, and for engagement by both him and Rudd with charitable behaviour in line with their genteel pretentions, the role that Banks played in helping the Flecks was dependent in each instance on the motivating force of this lasting connection. In this instance, the Flecks acted as a collective surrogate. For Elizabeth Cook, the reasons for assisting the Flecks were based in familial bonds and attendant obligations. However, she shared with Banks the common factor of being linked to the Flecks by way of her husband, and by duties anchored in the past.

The circumstances of Banks’s and Cook’s meeting meant that a more equitable bond pre-dated a patronage tie, but it was from this same period that the circumstances of the latter arose; and Banks would remain closely connected with Cook in the public imagination. Fondness of the kind shown towards Solander may have motivated this connection on a personal level, and it cannot be dismissed, but Banks certainly instrumentalized his friendship with Cook, cementing his legacy as the intimate of the century’s most celebrated explorer, and leveraging this association to build his influence, which swelled in the decades separating their deaths. Banks’s role in the Flecks affair therefore shows something of the ways in which patrons, scientific or otherwise, could gain from supporting those of a lesser rank, including through exertions of ‘aristocratic privilege’ reaffirming their position in society. Such bonds were persistent and compelling, their effects felt across lives and in waves across the years.